Sydney geek girl's Las Vegas jackpot

Asher Moses in Las Vegas

Most Australian tech entrepreneurs may be beating a path to Silicon Valley but Yiying Lu recently shifted her booming wall graphics business from San Francisco to Las Vegas.

And within weeks of the move, the Sydney graphics designer, who still lives in Australia a large chunk of the year, had already designed the new official Las Vegas marketing campaign for the Nevada Development Authority.

Her company, Walls360.com, which she co-founded with two Americans, creates high-end life-size wall graphics that can easily be re-applied to new surfaces.

While property prices and wages are skyrocketing in San Francisco, in Nevada real estate is cheap, there's a huge unemployed workforce (over 130,000 in Las Vegas alone) and income tax is low.

Yiying Lu designed the new "Yes Vegas" marketing campaign for the city for free.

The new Las Vegas HQ includes a large on-demand production facility and Lu says the company is "in the midst of a dramatic expansion". The company's first outside investor would be announced "shortly".

She believes Walls360 has created "a new medium and a new platform for creative expression".

"This was the optimal location for us – great proximity to global shipping hubs, and the absolute best place to create something on the scale that we imagined," said Lu.

Walls360 designed wall graphics for kids learning company PaddleDuck.

She said she hopes to open an on-demand wall graphics production facility in Sydney later this year.

Las Vegas also has a growing arts scene and a monthly First Friday arts festival, where Lu last week held an art show for kids.

The company will also take advantage this week of one of the world's biggest trade shows, the Consumer Electronics Show, held annually in Las Vegas and where potential new clients will be swarming.

Kids play with the Walls360 tangrams.

"We really like the fact that we can have a dinner meeting at four in the morning and have a choice between several Thai restaurants. You just can't do that anywhere else," Walls360 co-founder John Doffing told Vegas Inc.

To say thank you to the city for helping the company relocate, Lu designed, for free, a new "Yes Vegas!" marketing logo for the Nevada Development Authority that features on billboards along Paradise Road and Interstate 15 in Las Vegas.

It will be the basis for the city's new ad campaign and Lu has also designed Yes Vegas wall graphics and promotional badges.

Sydneysider and Walls360 co-founder Yiying Lu with the Tetris wall graphics she designed.

"It got an amazing response in blind tests. People told us, 'This says it all'. It encompasses and says everything we want to say. We think it's going to be a big campaign," the Nevada Development Authority's CEO, Somer Hollingsworth, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

In a separate statement, Hollingsworth said: "Yiying is a true ambassador for what our city has to offer."

Lu said designing the Las Vegas marketing campaign was a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and to see my designs plastered on billboards thoughout Las Vegas was pretty amazing".

Yiying Lu next to one of her basketball graphics.

Lu is even running a program that gives free interactive wall tangrams – shapes that kids can use to make geometric designs – to public primary school teachers in Nevada every time a wall graphics order is received in January.

"We want to give away millions of wall tangrams to classrooms all over the world over the coming years," said Lu.

Walls360 helped Sydney game developer, Bubble Gum Interactive, launch merchandising for its new game Little Space Heroes, creating a range of wall graphics pitched at kids that are based on characters in the game.

Video game work has been lucrative for Walls360.

The company also created wall graphics for another Australian childrens' app, PaddleDuck, with an A-Z range of animal characters designed for toddlers.

Lu said traditionally wall graphics had been printed on lower-quality vinyl or on monochromatic contact paper, and content selection typically consisted of clipart graphics and royalty free stock photography.

She believes Walls360 has a truly unique proposition as it focuses on high quality wall graphics and partnering with big brands such as games publisher Electronic Arts.

"We use the best re-positionable self-adhesive fabric material substrate currently available, the best fine art digital inks, and we create everything on-demand with the best large format eight-colour printers and precision cutters in the world," said Lu.

"Over the coming 90 days we are launching exclusive wall graphics collections featuring hundreds of thousands of curated wall graphics across hundreds of brands and categories."

20 comments so far

Are the blocks in the Tetris graphic intentionally non-uniform? What's with the gap between the blue and green?

Commenter

Mat

Date and time

January 09, 2012, 8:06AM

I was wondering the exact same thing! It actually frustrates me slightly,,,

Commenter

Mel

Date and time

January 09, 2012, 8:39AM

gaps in the tetris- graphic fail!

Commenter

gelk

Location

sydney!

Date and time

January 09, 2012, 9:07AM

Its intentional, the graphic artist knows what they doing. If there was no gaps, it would take longer to recognise it for all the shapes of the tetris blocks. And then from that empty space, your eyes lead to the next empty space, the middle, and then ultimately the far right. Which is the artists exact intention. But also notice, the use of strong colors to lighter colors from left to right as well. Thats 'Genius at Work' there.

Commenter

Pat

Date and time

January 09, 2012, 9:40AM

@pat, @Mal

Actually, they are sold as seperate pieces you can put toegther however you want. Thus the gaps.

Commenter

withaph

Location

Sydney

Date and time

January 09, 2012, 11:13AM

No, you haven't created "a new medium and a new platform for creative expression" - You sell stickers.

Commenter

MC

Location

Sydney

Date and time

January 09, 2012, 8:45AM

Tall poppy at it's best. Good work.

Commenter

Billy goat

Date and time

January 09, 2012, 11:07AM

Love the TETRIS graphic. Good to see quality Australian based products doing well against budget products.

Commenter

Homer Ridgemoore

Location

Girraween

Date and time

January 09, 2012, 8:53AM

I shouldn't have read that comment, because now I can't stop thinking about that gap and its fuelling my OCD.

Commenter

Guh

Date and time

January 09, 2012, 9:04AM

It's great to see Australians do well. Nothing wrong with it being stickers. It's probably what people said to the inventor of Post-it notes.Well done Yiying